An Engineering Landmark Faces Demolition

Architects Try to Save a Tower in Moscow

The Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow was built in 1922.Credit
Richard Pare

One of the great feats of 20th-century engineering, a landmark of modernist architecture is facing demolition. Late last month, the Russian State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting agreed to the dismantling of the Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow.

This is the Eiffel Tower of Russia, a 50-story conical structure of steel latticework, shaped roughly like a collapsing telescope, designed by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov. Commissioned by Lenin and completed in 1922, the tower was intended to spread the word of Communism through the new radio technology and to stand for the regime’s revolutionary ambition. Supported on a shallow ring of concrete, the tower is a diaphanous web rising into the sky. Only a shortage of materials thwarted plans to make it more than twice as tall — higher than Gustave Eiffel’s earlier creation in Paris. Even at that greater height, Shukhov’s construction was so efficient and elegant that his tower would have been a quarter of the Eiffel Tower’s weight.

A few miles from the Kremlin, inaccessible to tourists, the radio tower has been allowed to deteriorate for years, corroding while government authorities in Moscow debate its fate. In 2009, the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin expressed support for restoring the tower and making it a tourist attraction, but nothing came of that. The next year, the British architect Norman Foster joined a campaign to save the tower, which he called “a structure of dazzling brilliance and great historical importance.” Shukhov’s work is said to have partly inspired Mr. Foster’s so-called Gherkin, built for Swiss Re in London.

The tower has been a subject of debate in the Russian news media and a topic of round-table discussions. Now an array of international architects, engineers, academics and cultural leaders has signed a petition pleading with President Putin to override the committee’s decision and spare the tower, whose destruction makes way for reckless development. Proponents for dismantling the tower say it’s a wreck; the situation is a classic case of demolition by neglect. The chief architect of Moscow, Sergey Kuznetsov, has suggested the tower could be rebuilt elsewhere, and the ministry of culture more or less endorsed that idea in late February. But petitioners argue that moving the tower would strip the work of its context.

Replacing the tower with a building of up to 50 stories would be out of keeping with the historic neighborhood near the Shabolovskaya metro station, an area of distinguished early-Soviet-era housing, the petition says. The tower, “a beacon and symbol of progressive, forward-looking civilization,” the petition adds, deserves nomination to the Unesco World Heritage List. Mr. Putin could authorize the rezoning of the area around the tower to prevent construction of a large building, a step that might prevent demolition. The city government could also halt demolition.

Photo

The Shabolovka radio tower in Moscow was designed by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov.Credit
Richard Pare

Protesters are planning a demonstration on Tuesday. The Russian Parliament may take up the issue next week, according to Shukhov’s great-grandson, also named Vladimir, who has helped organize the petition. There is no announced date for taking the tower down, but a final decision by Russian authorities is expected by March 24.

Among the signatories to the petition are the architects Tadao Ando, Henry N. Cobb, Elizabeth Diller, Rem Koolhaas and Thom Mayne; the engineers Guy Nordenson and Leslie E. Robertson; and the Tate Museums director Nicholas Serota. The petition was written by Jean-Louis Cohen, the architectural historian, along with Richard Pare, the British photographer, both specialists in buildings and monuments of the Soviet era.

“The impression when you stand beneath it is unforgettable,” Mr. Pare wrote in an email over the weekend. “The elements surge upwards, creating a rush of optimism and elation.” He contrasted it with the Lenin Mausoleum, “a space that stands at the opposite pole to the brilliance of Shukhov’s masterpiece,” he wrote, adding, “From light to dark in eight years.”

A model of transparency and structural ingenuity, the tower consists of a series of stacked hyperboloids of diminishing size. Its geometric complexity belies the simplicity of its profile. A pioneer of modern engineering, Shukhov (1853-1939) devised the first oil pipeline for the Russian Empire, its first seaworthy oil tanker, and dozens of bridges, barges, buildings and boilers. The United States Navy acquired Shukhov’s patents a century ago to build lattice masts on its dreadnoughts. His groundbreaking work on hyperboloid geometry, a continuing influence on architects and engineers in the digital age, reached its apotheosis with the radio tower, commonly known as the Shukhov Tower.

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Engineering Landmark Faces Demolition. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe